When Raffi Garabedian co-founded Electric Hydrogen in 2020, he saw existing electrolyzers as too small and expensive to make green hydrogen economically viable. Instead of building standard sub-megawatt units, his team aimed for 100-megawatt systems at half the industry cost.
Initial market enthusiasm brought millions in capacity reservations, fueling construction of a Massachusetts manufacturing plant. Then came the “trough of disillusionment” – a global cooling on hydrogen as projects faltered under high costs.
In this episode, Lara Pierpoint talks to Raffi about taking big technology risks while building a factory during market volatility. He explains why startups, not incumbents, are best positioned to drive the cost reductions needed to make green hydrogen competitive with fossil alternatives.
Credits: Hosted by Lara Pierpoint. Produced by Erin Hardick. Edited by Anne Bailey and Stephen Lacey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.
The Green Blueprint is a co-production of Latitude Media and Trellis Climate. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts.
Transcript
Tag: Latitude Media Podcast at the Frontier of Climate Technology.
Lara Pierpoint: What is your favorite color of hydrogen and how do you feel about the hydrogen rainbow?
Raffi Garabedian: I don’t really like rainbows in general. I’m kind of grouchy that way.
Lara Pierpoint: Good to know.
Raffi Garabedian: I also don’t really care much for hydrogen. It’s a molecule, it’s an element. It’s lovely. I don’t see it in and of itself as a solution to any of the problems we have in energy.
Lara Pierpoint: Raffi Garabedian is in the hydrogen business,
Raffi Garabedian: Deploying really cheap, abundant renewables into sectors like the chemical industry are really what drives my interest in hydrogen and hence electrolytic hydrogen, so-called green hydrogen is the thing I’m interested in.
Lara Pierpoint: Raffi runs a company called Electric Hydrogen that manufactures electrolyzers. He founded it with his friend and longtime business associate, Dave Eaglesham. A few years back
Raffi Garabedian: We started Electric Hydrogen in very late 2020, essentially the beginning of 2021, kind of just at the beginning of maybe we could call it the latest hydrogen hype cycle.
Lara Pierpoint: At the time, the energy industry and specifically proponents of renewables were really interested in how hydrogen could be used as a way to store, move and use excess clean energy.
Raffi Garabedian: When we started out, our focus was deep decarbonization of critical industries. If our focus is deep decarbonization, we need to look first and foremost at the largest polluters, and which of those are opportunities to economically decarbonize with a green molecule that’s a replacement for fossil molecules.
Lara Pierpoint: We’ll get into the details of how the hydrogen is made a little bit later, but for now, all you need to know is that hydrogen made with clean energy is called green hydrogen and Raffi and Dave wanted to build machines that make green hydrogen AKA electrolyzers. Specifically, they wanted to build electrolyzers with proton exchange membranes or PEM electrolyzers for short.
Raffi Garabedian: Generally, PEM systems are relatively small. They’re measured in kilowatts, hundreds of kilowatts up to the largest today, one to two megawatts per electrolyzer, and they’re thought to be extremely expensive.
Lara Pierpoint: That combination of small, expensive machines wasn’t something that Raffi and Dave thought would be scalable, so they set out to build a much larger, cheaper. So can you say a little bit about how you thought about the size of your product as you were starting out?
Raffi Garabedian: Go for broke.
Lara Pierpoint: I’m Lara, and this is the Green Blueprint, a show about the architects of the clean energy economy. We’ve already invented most of the solutions needed to decarbonize the global economy, but many of these technologies are not yet commercial and they need to get financed and built at scale. We don’t have decades to get them commercialized. We have years this week I talked to Raffi Garabedian, co-founder and CEO of Electric Hydrogen about building big machines and the ups and downs of technology hype cycles.
Raffi Garabedian: Energy is the ultimate commodity. There’s nothing more fundamentally commoditized than energy, and so everything we talk about has to be rooted in cost.
Lara Pierpoint: Proton exchange membrane technology was invented in the early 1960s by General Electric for the US Navy. They used it to make oxygen on submarines.
Raffi Garabedian: So when you break water electrolytic, obviously you get hydrogen and oxygen. In the early days of PEM electrolysis, oxygen was the product you wanted to help people breathe in submarines,
Lara Pierpoint: PEM electrolysis works by moving water through a two-sided membrane with the help of an electric current water moves through and then hydrogen forms on one side and oxygen forms on the other side. The hydrogen can then be used as an energy carrier. So Raffi and Dave wanted to build these electrolyzers and they wanted to make them a lot less expensive because taking existing technology and making it more efficient and therefore less expensive. Well, that’s kind of their thing.
Raffi Garabedian: This harkens back to my and my co-founder’s experience in the solar industry where we did exactly the same thing. Your listeners who know something about solar will recognize that the cost of solar modules has come down orders of magnitude in the last 20 years, and that’s in part because of material cost reductions, but actually much more so because of scale and efficiency improvements. Efficiency drives the cost of solar systems because the same physical module when it’s more efficient, produces more energy and the cost is measured in dollars per watt, right? Not dollars per module. The same, it turns out can be true of electrolyzers, and that’s really the thing we focused on at Electric Hydrogen in the early days.
Lara Pierpoint: So once Raffi and Dave decided they wanted to build these electrolyzers, they had to decide how big to make them at the top of the show. Raffi said most of the PEM technology on the market today ranges from a few kilowatts to a few megawatts.
Raffi Garabedian: The sectors were looking to decarbonize with green molecules, so-called green molecules. If you measure them in terms of electrolysis or generating capacity, we’re talking multiple tets of needed new energy supply, new power supply to cross into those sectors.
Lara Pierpoint: As a reminder, one terawatt equals 1 million megawatts. So the size of the electrolyzers on the market just wasn’t going to cut it.
Raffi Garabedian: People were scratching their heads in the market about, geez, how is this green hydrogen stuff going to work if you’re making 10 megawatt electrolyzers or two megawatt electrolyzers, I need a gigawatt of hydrogen. This doesn’t sound like a real solution,
Lara Pierpoint: And that’s why Electric Hydrogen decided to go bigger, much bigger.
Raffi Garabedian: When we approach people with the idea of a hundred megawatt scale product, it definitely resonated as did the price point that we thought we could achieve.
Lara Pierpoint: So with their expertise and what they knew at the time about market demand, Raffi and Dave started scaling Electric Hydrogen. It didn’t take long to find potential customers for their a hundred megawatts systems, and they made plans to build their own manufacturing facility in Devon’s, Massachusetts. But even with this momentum, Raffi knew that financing the first few systems would be a big challenge.
Raffi Garabedian: It’s super hard to finance something that big as a first of a kind. In fact, it’s hard to finance as a second or a third of a kind too. It doesn’t get easier until you’ve probably built four or five of them. That’s a pretty tall order. It’s a lot of money that someone has to put to risk to see this technology launch.
Lara Pierpoint: In December of 2024, Electric Hydrogen announced the opening of its Massachusetts Gigafactory. The opening marked a major milestone for the company. I talked with Raffi about Electric Hydrogen scaling journey, how they finance the factory and where their electrolyzers are being deployed. Remember that hype cycle that Raffi mentioned at the top, while the next phase was about to make things difficult, obviously as you’re getting started, the very first thing you build is not about to be a hundred megawatt. So can you talk about your pilot projects? How did you decide to size them? How did you finance them? What were these projects like and what did they prove for you?
Raffi Garabedian: I haven’t mentioned this, but an electrolysis device is called a stack because it’s like a stack of pancakes. Each pancake in the stack is a cell. Many of those pancakes stacked up makes a stack. The stack is the unit of operation. It’s the device that produces hydrogen from water and electricity. As we scaled it up the stack technology became proven and we needed platforms. Well not proven. The stack technology became materialized, and we needed test systems in order to validate that it works the way we expect it to work. So the first thing we built was a 330 kilowatt test system, just a test system in the lab, and think of that as a way to test a few of these cells at a time. We got a bunch of runtime under our belts there, and then we put our minds to building a larger system at a megawatt scale.
A megawatt scale is still a small fraction of the capacity of our stack, but it’s the next thing we built. We built that, operated it for a while and then decided it’s time to produce a large scale system that represents the repeat unit that will be produced in our a hundred megawatt plant. So our a hundred megawatt plant is not one stack. It’s a repeat of stacks and power conversion. And so we built that repeat unit in San Jose. It’s a 10 megawatt scale electrolyzer. It’s operating today and have utilized that to prove out the stack technology, but also more importantly, the, or just as importantly, the integration of the stack technology into the so-called balance of plant, which is the control systems, the power conversion systems, the fluid systems that handle the water, purify it, separate the gases from the water, et cetera.
Lara Pierpoint: And as you’re building and financing these successively larger demos effectively, is this all venture financing government grants? What sorts of things did you bring to bear?
Raffi Garabedian: This is almost all venture financing. So we raised quite a bit of money from the venture community, thankfully at a time when again, there was a lot of interest in green hydrogen, which gave us the ability to self-finance and move very, very quickly.
Lara Pierpoint: And so the next decision you made was to build a manufacturing plant for your electrolyzers. So talk about that decision. Was that sort of very obviously the next phase, or did you consider building a hundred megawatt project before you built a manufacturing facility? How did you think about that next step?
Raffi Garabedian: The cell technology is bespoke. It’s invented by us. It can only be made by us. We did not see, and we’re not interested in an outsourcing approach to build cells and stacks. And so even to get to the 10 megawatt facility, we needed a manufacturing operation. We made these full scale devices in r and d labs. They happened to be in Natick, Massachusetts for about a year. But at the same time, we were searching for ultimately found and built out our manufacturing facility down the road in a town called Devon’s Mass. We come from a co-founders and I come from a manufacturing background at First Solar building a factory is a big thing. It’s a heavy undertaking, but it was a necessary step to proving out the technology because look, I mean making something work in the lab is one thing. Making it work in a manufacturing environment at a throughput that is realistic and at a cost structure that works for the business. That’s a whole nother matter.
Lara Pierpoint: Well, so let’s get into the details of this. So you mentioned that you needed to build a small amount of manufacturing capacity just to be able to get to your 10 megawatt demo. Is that right?
Raffi Garabedian: Yeah, so in our manufacturing facility, we built a pilot line, and so you can sometimes think of a manufacturing facility as multiple parallel lines feeding into larger unit operations. We built a pilot line for the critical piece of the technology, which is really the membrane electrode assembly and some of the other components, and started to exercise. It took maybe six months, I’d say, to root out all the issues to debug that process, which you find all sorts of things when you do this because you no longer have PhDs building something, you have technicians building ’em, and it’s a whole nother animal. So yeah, that’s what we had to go through to start to produce at a scale sufficient to feed both our 10 megawatt pilot plant in San Jose, but also to continue to iterate on the technology and improve its performance and reliability. We’re now in the phase of ramping up the capacity on that line to produce commercial volumes.
Lara Pierpoint: And so how have you been thinking about lining up customers as you go into building this pilot line and ultimately this bigger manufacturing facility? At what point did you start actually trying to line customers up for electrolyzers?
Raffi Garabedian: Oh, we’ve been outselling for I’d say two years now. Laura, one thing I’ll note here is that for a thing at the scale, we’re making it a hundred megawatt electrolyzer plant. The sales cycles are very, very long because they’re tied to project development life cycles, and project development at this scale can take anywhere from three to five years. So our customer’s journey is quite long and their technology selection occurs partway through that journey. But then there’s a lot more to be done before they reach what’s called financial investment decision, FID, which in commercial terms means an order for us, and then we have to produce the electrolyzer, deliver it, commission it before it goes into operation. We didn’t discuss this, but worth noting here, we at Electric Hydrogen are not a producer of hydrogen. We produce the equipment, the technology that enables other people to produce hydrogen at their projects, those project sites, they can be at a refinery, they can be at a ammonia plant, they can be an e methanol facility, they could be an eSAF, sustainable aviation fuel facility, et cetera, et cetera.
Lara Pierpoint: So you’re in the process of securing customers, as you say, these are kind of long lead times. And was there sort of a specific signal you were waiting for with respect to your customer acquisition before you pulled the trigger on building the manufacturing plant? Or were those almost independent journeys for you?
Raffi Garabedian: Yeah, we were looking for signals and we got them in the form of capacity reservation agreements. So we have a number of these agreements with various project developers. I’ll name a few that are public intersect power a ES or a couple that we have agreements with. Basically they say, look, we’ll put some cash down to reserve your manufacturing capacity over the next few years so that we have access to your technology in our projects. Now that only works in a seller’s market, a market where people are anticipating that demand for the product. The electrolyzer in this case will outstrip the available supply of technology that meets their needs. And at the time we signed these agreements, it was a seller’s market, and so we were able to pull it off, and that was the demand signal that kind of put the wind in our sails to build the factory and start to scale it up. Things changed quickly. It’s not a seller’s market in electrolytic hydrogen anymore, at least not for the time being. We’ve definitely come out of hype mode and we’re in hydrogen disillusionment mode right now. I think globally,
Lara Pierpoint: The trough of disillusionment that inevitably follows the hype cycle. Yeah,
Raffi Garabedian: Yeah, yeah. We’re definitely in it, but we’re now past capacity reservation agreements and really the demand signals we look at now are purchase orders. So real business to build electrolyzers for folks who need them.
Lara Pierpoint: But that’s jumping ahead after the break. Raffi explains how Electric Hydrogen found customers for their a hundred million dollars product and where the hype cycle is today. Can you share what was the level of willingness to pay in this moment of high hype and sort of the seller’s market? How much cash did they put on the table relative to the total cost of these electrolyzers?
Raffi Garabedian: Well, I can’t give you an actual number because it’s confidential, but I’ll just tell you it’s millions per customer for the privilege of reserving future capacity.
Lara Pierpoint: And what’s the total cost of each electrolyzer?
Raffi Garabedian: If you look at total installed cost, typical electrolyzer will be somewhere between $1,500 a kilowatt and $2,500 a kilowatt. So round numbers call it 2000, so that’s $200 million for a hundred megawatt electrolyzer plant. We are about half that total installed cost.
Lara Pierpoint: So you’re lining up customers, you have a technology that works, you’re ready to go build this manufacturing facility and get it started up with a pilot line, and you need financing to build this facility. So talk a little bit about how you thought about that challenge.
Raffi Garabedian: So one of the things we did early on is put in place a equipment debt finance instrument. And the concept there is that you could spend venture dollars buying equipment for manufacturing. Again, dollars are super expensive, so it’s hard to justify doing that. Another mechanism is to debt finance, but who’s going to lend you money to build a manufacturing facility for a product that’s unproven yet? Incomes a class of capital equipment finance capital, which is kind of like a mortgage on your house. You use that capital to buy equipment, let’s say a laser cutter, for example. And the debt financier has a lien on the equipment. So if for some reason you can’t pay back your debt, they own the equipment and can turn around and sell it for a pretty well established return on their initial investment. So this is an amazing, amazing, wonderful way to finance manufacturing facilities if you can pull it together, which is what we did. We also want a DOE grant to help us improve our manufacturing operation, increased throughput, reduced cost, and some of that capital is also going towards our manufacturing expansion.
Lara Pierpoint: Very cool. So let’s talk about how you secured the equipment financing for a second. And I have a provocative question for you, which is that in the early part of your company years, you’re selling to venture capitalists or you’re working to finance your operations with venture capitalists. And a lot of what venture capitalists love to hear is how bespoke your technology is, how much IP there is, how big the moat is between you and what everyone else is doing, how unique it is. And when you go talk to an equipment financier, you basically want to have the opposite argument, right? Because they want to know that they can resell this and it’s going to be easy for someone else to use and it’s low risk and all these other things. So how did you think about that dichotomy and where do you think you fall on that actual technology risk spectrum?
Raffi Garabedian: Yeah, you’re right. Venture capital wants a moat, a technology moat. In our case, what’s special about you? What can you defend? And that does on the face of it seemed to be a conflict. We always have taken the position, and again, this is learning from our experience in manufacturing and solar. We’ve always taken the position that it’s in our interest to leverage as much as possible existing solutions, particularly manufacturing solutions from nearby industries. Lots of people in the world use membranes for different things like water purification for example. Can we borrow, adapt manufacturing technology, process technology from those industries to our needs? So the approach we’ve always taken is avoid customization of equipment wherever possible. You use standard off the shelf equipment, it can always be configured, so you’d consider that more tooling, but use available equipment that’s well proven, well demonstrated with all the bugs and kinks worked out of it, adapted to our needs, and that fits very well with the capital financing, the equipment financing approach.
Lara Pierpoint: So you could say that the guts inside the sell itself is something that is distinctly yours, but the equipment used to manufacture it. You worked really hard to make sure that that was as standardized as possible.
Raffi Garabedian: That’s right. I’d say the only equipment on our line that’s highly non-standard is our test equipment, which is all home brew. Yeah, home brew stuff.
Lara Pierpoint: Okay, so you’re ready to go build your manufacturing plant, you’ve got financing for it, but obviously you also need customers to be ultimately really buying this, and it’s not straightforward for them to figure out how to finance a hundred megawatt. So how did you go about securing your customers and thinking about the financing that they were going to need in order to actually build these?
Raffi Garabedian: There’s this thing that you’ve heard about bankability. What does that mean? It means is a technology financeable, will an infrastructure capital provider, equity and debt, will they put their money to work to build one of these things? And the answer is large scale green hydrogen is not bankable today. So who’s going to buy if they’re dependent on project finance? Most project developers use project finance. They don’t buy and build on their own balance sheet. They partner with capital providers to do that. And so as we talk to potential customers, the interest in our product was very strong. Our price point is unbeatable and enables a lot of projects to actually economically work, whereas otherwise they wouldn’t. But geez, yeah, we’re not sure we can finance it. So as you think about that problem, and we learned more and more talking to more and more customers, we recognized what we needed was what’s called a balance sheet buyer, right? This is somebody who’s willing to buy using their own capital, not going to a bank, a project finance bank. And why is that interesting? It’s interesting because generally there’s somebody at a company like that who can determine that the risk is worth taking in comes the billionaire. So there are very few people actually, there are very few companies and potential customers who fit this mold, and generally they involve somebody who almost like, it’s not necessarily a sole proprietorship, but a company that maybe makes decisions in that way.
Lara Pierpoint: So say a bit more about how you went about searching for customers. Were you looking for those with big balance sheets or for those that really had a big risk appetite and then say more about this elusive billionaire, what sort of industry were they in? What exactly was their skin in this game when it came to hydrogen production?
Raffi Garabedian: We spend a lot of time thinking about why does the customer’s project make sense? Because if it doesn’t make sense, it really actually probably won’t get built. Even today, the world of electrolytic hydrogen is full of projects that shouldn’t get built. Right now, the green hydrogen or electrolytic hydrogen market is extremely subsidy dependent. The industry hasn’t scaled yet. We haven’t gotten down our cost curve. And so the end product is considerably more expensive than the fossil alternative and hence requires some sort of policy to drive its adoption, either a character, a stick. But what we found is that that in and of itself is not sufficient to cause end user to buy. So ammonia is used to make fertilizer. The fertilizer industry has no compulsion or real kind of soft motivation to decarbonize. Interestingly, by the time ammonia gets turned into fertilizer, it gets turned into food that ultimately gets sold to consumers, right?
No one really cares through that whole supply chain whether the ammonia was high or low emission. And so even though there’s relatively low switching costs, ammonia producers are not interested in taking the risk of switching from fossil to green or clean. And we found that not only here in the US but around the world actually in Europe, on the other hand, they have both subsidies, support mechanisms and also compulsions or sticks. And these are mandates to decarbonize for certain high emission industries. So the chemical industry, for example, is one of the industries in Europe that needs to decarbonize incrementally per the European delegated Act. And that mandate provides a further motivation for the end consumers of molecules to make the transition. That’s the kind of driver that we think makes projects work. And so we look at the end offtake for a project. If the end buyer is a company operating in Europe that is subject to these kinds of incentives and mandates, then we can do the math on that and conclude whether or not the project actually works or doesn’t work. And hence we can predict with higher fidelity whether the project will actually get built, which is what we really care about.
Lara Pierpoint: Let’s talk a little bit about building the factory in Massachusetts. So it’s a no joke to build things, and we talk about that often on this show. Has there been a moment in the context of standing up your pilot line and now moving into its expansion where you’ve been kind of wondering, is this going to work?
Raffi Garabedian: A lot of people jump into manufacturing not having really done it before. We’ve done it before. So I think we’re gluttons for punishment trying to do it again. But it’s a compulsion, it’s a disease I guess, that you can have. And we have it even with all our enterprise experience in advanced manufacturing and standing up new manufacturing facilities. I would say we still underestimated the problem and failed to anticipate some critical issues that in hindsight, we should have anticipated. So super interesting and maybe something for me to think about at length once we’re fully through it. But yeah, it’s been a very tough rocky road over the period of, I think the last year, but we’re at a good place now.
Lara Pierpoint: Okay. Well, let’s talk about some reflections on all of this. Is there anything that you can talk about that you might have done differently in the context of your scaling journey? It seems like you’re hitting on all pistons, you’re doing some great work, particularly with customer acquisition in this long and challenging sales cycle. But anything that you might’ve strategically done a little bit differently in your scaling journey to date?
Raffi Garabedian: I think we underestimated the challenges of deploying and customer acquisition, as you say, at the scale that we operate at. And in hindsight, I think we should have also been far more scrutinous, is that a word? We should apply a lot more scrutiny to our customer conversations to focus in on earlier on markets that actually make sense and can ultimately lead to FIS and construction of electrolyzers. So yeah, a lot to learn from the journey. I don’t think, looking back on our experience, I wouldn’t say any of the learnings and insights are really around the technical scaling the manufacturing side. I mean, there’s a lot there, but really it’s the scaling of the market that’s been the hardest and that in hindsight, I think we could have taken a different approach to.
Lara Pierpoint: Well, and so let’s dig into that a little bit more. So one of the things that you mentioned, for example, is that we are in a trough of disillusionment, as it were in terms of the hydrogen hype cycle. So I think there’s some ways in which that’s probably real and meaningful that maybe folks are thinking less about hydrogen production for some serious reasons, and also that just hype bursts eventually whether or not it should. So can you say a little bit more about what you think is the shape of this trough of disillusionment, what you’re seeing out there in the market and how that’s affecting your strategy now?
Raffi Garabedian: So I think as it stands today, people should be disillusioned with electrolytic hydrogen. It is too expensive. And for me, that’s no surprise. In fact, we started the company specifically to address that problem, electrolyzers today in the $2,000 a kilowatt range. They’re too expensive to produce economically viable green hydrogen. And we’re seeing this in projects all through the world. So where green hydrogen projects are being built, they’re being built at price points that don’t really make economic sense without massive subsidy support. And policymakers are seeing this and realizing, oh, well maybe this isn’t really affordable, right? Maybe this is a little harder than we thought. We should scale back our ambitions, our technology and our product reduces that cost by 50% and gets us into the ballpark where green hydrogen becomes economically viable with moderate subsidy and support. And once we get to scale, it’ll get even better from there. So I think a future where molecules are at parody with their fossil alternatives is actually achievable, but we have to take bolder steps, particularly on technology and cost reduction in order to get there.
Lara Pierpoint: And how do you think about this with respect to effectively your competitors out there because they’re established PEM, electrolyzer manufacturing companies out there, have they realized this too? Are they starting to also focus on cost reduction? Do you think it’s important that there are a large number of approaches here, or what is it that also gives you confidence in your approach, specifically in surviving this trough of disillusionment as it were, and demonstrating cost parity?
Raffi Garabedian: Okay, so if you look at the incumbent electrolyzer producers, there are the big industrials. I’m talking about companies like Siemens and Teon Croup Cummins, who are not in the business of mercilessly driving cost out of their products, right? They’re heavy industrial suppliers. They’re generally in the business of maintaining certain margin profiles and selling value. I don’t think that works in green hydrogen. It didn’t work in solar, by the way.
Lara Pierpoint: Yeah, that’s a fair point.
Raffi Garabedian: So that’s kind of like the history of solar really taught me that the large industrials, once a business gets focused on cost, they kind of step out, step back and step out. So that’s one class of electrolyzer producers. Then there are kind of some pure plays companies like Nell, like Plug Power is not quite a pure play, but you could put them in that category. And these are folks who haven’t shown the desire maybe, or the ability to be highly innovative, technically to drive cost. So where does the change come from? It comes from startups like us. That’s what we believe. And it also comes from China. Again, back to the solar industry. If you look at the history of cost reduction in solar, a lot of the impetus for driving cost out came from two places. It came from First Solar. We were the only company who actually openly published our cost, not just our price in a desire to reduce the price of solar industry wide, we wanted to lead the market down in pricing and China who just came in and mercilessly undercut everybody they could. Now, the geopolitics are different now than they were in the early days of solar and China can’t play that game again at not in Europe and in the us. So it’s a different dynamic, but certainly we view them. We view Chinese companies as the likely competitors who are also going to get down the cost curve along with us.
Lara Pierpoint: That makes sense. Okay. If I wired a hundred million dollars into your company’s bank account tomorrow, what would you do with it?
Raffi Garabedian: Go faster.
Lara Pierpoint: Yes, I love that answer.
Raffi Garabedian: I think we’re on the right track. Again, we’re super focused on cost and scale, which are the only two things that matter in the energy industry. And the only thing slowing us down is our ability to make the pragmatic decisions every step of the way to move fast.
Lara Pierpoint: Raffi, thank you so much for joining us on The Green Blueprint. This has been a super fascinating interview and I can’t wait to see what happens with H2 in the years to come.
Raffi Garabedian: Alright, thanks Lara. Great talking to you.
Lara Pierpoint: Raffi Garabedian is the co-founder and CEO of Electric Hydrogen. The Green Blueprint is produced by Latitude Media in partnership with Trellis Climate. The show is hosted by me, Lara Pierpoint. Our producer is Erin Hardick, Anne Bailey is our senior editor. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. If you’d like to suggest topics or guests for the show, send an email to the greenblueprint@latitudemedia.com. You can listen to The Green Blueprint at latitudemedia.com or subscribe wherever you get podcasts. And if you have fellow clean energy or climate tech travelers who would benefit from the insights in this show, send them a link. This is The Green Blueprint, a show about the architects of the clean energy economy.
